Award-winning web development since 1995
Written: November 3, 2015
My previous blog reported on a defective HP printer after only 5 months of very light use, so today after a bike ride I returned home to find my replacement HP Officejet Pro 6830 printer all ready to un-box and setup. I was giddy with excitement, because who doesn’t like receiving a free gift in the mail? The old printer was unplugged, cartridges removed, then the replacement printer was plugged in and I re-used my previous cartridges. Setup went along only so far, and then I received a warning page about my cartridges telling me to, “Install the Setup Cartridges”.
I tried a second set of cartridges that I had bought last week and used on my defective printer, but these weren’t accepted by the replacement printer. I phoned HP tech support and spent the next 54 minutes following inane instructions from a person living in a far away land where English was not their first language. Out of curiosity I took the brand new cartridges sent with the replacement printer and tried those, suddenly my setup screen advanced a few more steps until it reached Printer Alignment. At this step out came a page in pretty cyan colors, but not other colors, followed by a dialog, “Alignment Failed”.
Tech support promised to send out yet another replacement printer to replace the first replacement printer. My oh my, how can a major company like HP stay in business when their consumer printers seemingly don’t quite work as advertised? After buying HP products since the 1970’s I’m not sure why I would ever buy anything from HP for the rest of my adult life. How can such a great brand like HP have so much trouble making their printers work, out of the box?
As a small business owner I avoid using paper wherever possible, and instead prefer to use email, PDF documents and share documents in the cloud. I do have a need to print out envelopes, invoices and other documents, but my use is very light. My old HP inkjet printer had recently died, so in May 2015 I went to Staples and found a replacement inkjet printer, also from HP called the OfficeJet 6830.
For five months it dutifully worked as designed so printing was routine, however just this past week on the display I saw a message, “Problem with printhead”. Uh oh, that doesn’t sound too good I thought. I tried a few things to remedy the situation:
Nothing was working, so I finally phoned the HP support number at 800 474-6836. Ironically the automated system really wanted me to go back to their web site and report the problem, but I persisted and spent the next 25 minutes and 13 seconds on the phone speaking with two different people until the manager said the magic words, “We will ship you a replacement printer at no charge.”
Whew, now that is the kind of customer service that I can live with and talk about. Of course, there was no reason that I had to spend that much time on the phone to persuade HP to fix a problem that they are very aware of, because their user forums are filled with hundreds of identical complaints about “Problem with printhead”. In an ideal world HP would be proactive and issue a product recall, like in the auto industry, then contact me and alert me to the issue and tell me the steps when my printer showed the problem.
In the business world it is very important to keep your customers loyal, because if they love your brand they may just stick with you for decades and start telling all their friends about you in the process.
Tags: HP printer
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Great Efforts brother for the troublesome you faced.
Sometimes big brands like HP doesn’t make any choice for customers.